PS several of my former students who didn't end up in academia are making way more money than I am. Academics don't compete for professorships to get rich. If I wanted to make money I would be in the private sector. I chose academia because I value other things above money: the ability to work on problems that interest me, the ability to mentor smart and interesting and curious students, the ability to control my own destiny, and perhaps above all else, to spend my time interacting with smart, interesting people who are also not driven by the pursuit of wealth.
To be sure, a tenured professor's salary is comfortable (unless you are in NYC, SFO, Tokyo, London, Paris, etc), but it is also has a definitive ceiling. It's not like you can work double the hours and get double the salary. Even if you generate a great discovery, the salary increment, if any, is comparably modest --- orders of magnitude smaller than for example the bonuses one gets on Wall Street for a successful quarter of sales of shady investments to unsuspecting investors.
As an illustration: A colleague of mine who's at the top of his field just negotiated a raise, (using a competing offer from an Ivy League school), and do you know what his raise was? ... He got an additional $15,000 per year to his salary of around $140k. After taxes he'll get around $600 or $700 per month extra. Now tell me again about the riches of being a tenured prof? If he was working in the private sector (Wall Street, or consulting, or medicine, which he could easily do given his skill set) he would be making integer multiples of this salary.
To be sure, a tenured professor's salary is comfortable (unless you are in NYC, SFO, Tokyo, London, Paris, etc), but it is also has a definitive ceiling. It's not like you can work double the hours and get double the salary. Even if you generate a great discovery, the salary increment, if any, is comparably modest --- orders of magnitude smaller than for example the bonuses one gets on Wall Street for a successful quarter of sales of shady investments to unsuspecting investors.
As an illustration: A colleague of mine who's at the top of his field just negotiated a raise, (using a competing offer from an Ivy League school), and do you know what his raise was? ... He got an additional $15,000 per year to his salary of around $140k. After taxes he'll get around $600 or $700 per month extra. Now tell me again about the riches of being a tenured prof? If he was working in the private sector (Wall Street, or consulting, or medicine, which he could easily do given his skill set) he would be making integer multiples of this salary.